[zeromq-dev] Fail fast

[William McVey]

On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 10:09 -0400, Robin Weisberg wrote:
> I'm OK with crashing when a library is being misused BUT things like
> passing in bad hostnames on initialization or binding to names that
> don't exist should result in an error code or exception being returned
> instead of crashing. 

Personally, this was show stopper for me. I was tinkering with the
python bindings, hit a 'failure' condition which triggered an
exit/assert (I don't recall which it was) within the library code and
caused the python interpreter to immediately exit. I'm also in favor of
fail fast, but at least in the python world, failures should be in the
form of an exception that can be caught and trigger proper cleanup
routines, not process termination within library code leaving the rest
of the application in an indeterminate (often hosed) state. I moved on
to RabbitMQ that very day. I am still on the zeromq list mostly so I can
track development happenings in case I see hope of improvement that
might move 0MQ back into the realm of consideration.

  -- William